Donald Trump, Birtherism, Fox News, and GOP $1 Billion Means Obama in Battle of His Career

WASHINGTON – Wolf Blitzer versus Donald Trump on Tuesday, coupled with Mitt Romney releasing his own birth certificate, which ended up dredging up his father’s birth in Mexico, proved being upstaged by crazy doesn’t bother team Romney. Fox News Channel showed their own brand of wacky or at least woefully unfair and unbalanced showmanship, by releasing the video above on “Fox and Friends,” which brought charges from Media Matters that made the New York Times saying the show may have run afoul of Rupert Murdoch’s rules. That’s funny. All of this reveals Republicans, including their satellite branch run by Roger Ailes, intend to do whatever it takes to win in November or spend $1 billion trying. It’s awakened the Obamans to a reality they didn’t fully anticipate.

Republican super PACs and other outside groups shaped by a loose network of prominent conservatives – including Karl Rove, the Koch brothers and Tom Donohue of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce – plan to spend roughly $1 billion on November’s elections for the White House and control of Congress, according to officials familiar with the groups’ internal operations. [by Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei of Politico]

That has some Democrats worried about —wait for it— Barack Obama’s brand. The noise you just heard was progressive activists laughing out loud. “Hope and change” sailed a long time ago.

John Heilemann, the co-author of Game Change, wrote on Tuesday in New York magazine about Obama’s “hope” now turning into “fear.” You’ll just have to ignore the unintentionally hilarious thread running through Heilemann’s piece that posits Pres. Obama being a (gasp!) politician as anything remotely newsworthy. As I prove in my book, starting with David Plouffe and David Axelrod, Obama and his team are some of the most ruthless operatives working for a political animal who has already done just about anything to win elective office. Heilimann helpfully quotes someone addressing that Mitt Romney isn’t one of the scarier model Republicans:

A prominent private-equity player in Gotham who supports Obama agrees with all of that but adds another insight. “Among rich Republicans, the view of Obama is that he’s the Devil,” this person says. “But on the Democratic side, certainly on Wall Street, there’s no visceral reaction against Romney. So if I give $10 million, I’m out the $10 million, and I’m gonna pay more in taxes if Obama wins. And I’m doing it against somebody who—I may not agree with his social views, but I don’t think he’s a bad person. And I’m not really into negative advertising, which is what a super-PAC would do … Then there’s the fact nobody on Wall Street thinks Obama gives a s— about them. They think his attitude is, ‘If I lose Wall Street, it’s not the end of the world.’ And they’re right.”

One way the Obaman’s hope to change this feeling is to employ “He’s never been in it for you,” an excellent weapon, because it rings true.

Pres. Obama has the difficult task of running on a first term that was mostly made of half-measures, which has led him into an economic season that isn’t as robust as it would have been had he listened to progressive economists, including doing a real stimulus and a health care bill tied to Medicare or the public option. Barack Obama has reaped what he conservatively sowed into our collective future by compromises that tilted the entire economic conversation to the right, setting up Mitt Romney and Republicans, though Obama couldn’t wish for a general election opponent more target rich.

Two things loom large today. Republicans aren’t as squeamish as Democrats about outside money, another thing Obama baked into the cake and helped Burton’s Super PAC become a “f—— abysmal failure,” as Hollywood mogul and large Democratic donor Jeffrey Katzenberg labeled it. Republicans heard the rumor of Obama raising $1 billion and got stoked to do it themselves, so that now they actually are on their way, while team Obama reportedly is not.

“This is going to be a very close race, but I’d rather be us than them.” – David Plouffe

When Barack Obama was elected in 2008, the Republican Party was in shambles and conservatives thought their time was over. In 2010, because of the Tea Party, a weak Democratic Party message and with no economic message from Pres. Obama, conservatives roared back. Meanwhile, Ron and Ran Paul continue to build a Libertarian beast of their own, which could turn Congress into a more conservative engine, even as Democrats are poised to own the demographics for presidential years to come, if they can pull off a win for Pres. Obama in 2012.

What happens if Mitt Romney wins?

“We’re gonna say, ‘Let’s be clear what he would do as president.’ Potentially abortion will be criminalized. Women will be denied contraceptive services. He’s far right on immigration. He supports efforts to amend the Constitution to ban gay marriage.” – David Plouffe

Heilemann calls that utilizing fear.

But did you notice what’s missing in Plouffe’s patter above? Once again, not one word about the economy and the difference liberal economics could mean for you.

Taylor Marsh, a veteran political analyst and former Huffington Post contributor, is the author of The Hillary Effect, available at Barnes and Noble and on Amazon. Her new-media blog www.taylormarsh.com covers national politics, women and power.

Of course, Wall Street will throw their full weight behind the Republicans. The only issue that truly matters to the mandarins of the Republican party is to use the government to transfer as much of the nation’s income and wealth to the already wealthy as possible. This is also Wall Street’s main goal for the government.

The issues like gay marriage and abortion are only important because they provide the votes needed for the transfer of wealth from people who are willing to do the one thing the mandarins would never do, vote against their own economic self-interests.

Truth be told, the Republicans would prefer that the gay marriage and abortion issues not be resolved, that these issues continue to divide the country and provide continued conservative support for the transfer of wealth to the wealthy. If these issues were resolved, new ones would just have to be found and hyped up by the right wing media machine to generate the votes needed to continue the looting of the middle class.

RP

Obama has brought some of this on himself. Had he led from his early election rhetoric that he was going to be the leader of all Americans, not blue state or red state Americans, then he would not have the divided America he has today from his 1%/99% America. Some that are in the middle class that pay income tax relate more to the 1% than they do to the 40% that do not pay any income tax.

As for the money, I would like to see one thing happen before anything happens with money. I would like to see legislation that requires all speech, written or spoken, to include complete subject material and not statements or comments taken out of context and used in negative ads.

I believe more harm comes from misinformation due to PACS and candidates not having to tell 100% of the truth than would come from $1B in truthful advertising. Wonder how SCOTUS would view a “truth in compaigning law” where freedom of speech was not infringed on as long as everything was said and not just distorted speech

slamfu

“I would like to see legislation that requires all speech, written or spoken, to include complete subject material and not statements or comments taken out of context and used in negative ads.”

While that would be nice, FOX news has already won their court case vs. Jane Akre and her husband, setting the precedent that they have the 1st amendment right to put out information they know to be false or misleading. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Akre

merkin

Obama has brought some of this on himself. Had he led from his early election rhetoric that he was going to be the leader of all Americans, not blue state or red state Americans, then he would not have the divided America he has today from his 1%/99%.

Obama tried to reach a middle ground with the Republicans. He based his health care imitative on a Republican proposal originally written by the Heritage Foundation and implemented by the current conservative standard bearer, Mitt Romney. This is in spite of the fact that it is a poor idea, relying on the private, for profit, costly, insurance companies, prohibiting any competition for them from the only source that has ever been able to provide low cost insurance and health care cost containment in the US, the not for profit, community rate based organization, the so-called community option. He had no idea that the Republicans would reject their own proposal, demonizing their own idea, just because Obama proposed it. And that they would not even make a counter proposal, indicating that they had no intention of compromising, that they would simply obstruct any proposal that Obama made, that they were willing to continue to live with the ever increasing cost of health care, and the ever increasing numbers of people who could no longer afford it, the ever increasing numbers of people thrown into bankruptcy because of it.

If the cost of health care in the US was the same as the average cost of health care in the other developed countries, we would have no budget deficit and businesses in the US would be relieved of more costs than they pay in federal corporate taxes. Both are stated aims of the Republican party, where once again they failed to do anything but talk.

The same thing happened with the other massive problem facing the country, climate change. Obama took up a Republican proposal to deal with the problem, cap and trade, designed to cut out the pound of flesh required to pay off the Republican’s lords and masters, Wall Street. Once again the Republicans rejected and demonized their own idea, the proposal of their own candidate for President in 2008. They even went so far as to deny that a problem exists, going against the positions of their two previous presidential candidates.

These weren’t the only areas in which the Republicans refused to compromise, even on the basis of proposals that they had made. In fact, it is hard to think of a single instance where Obama didn’t come more than half way, only to find the Republicans retreating en mass

Obama didn’t start the class war. It is the Republicans who decided to fight openly and vigorously for the very wealthy at the cost of everyone else. It is the Republicans who proposed wage suppression for the middle class. It is the Republicans who proposed the deregulation that has repeatedly resulted in one financial crisis after another, from the Savings and Loan mess, the stock market and commodity market bubbles to the Great Financial Crisis and Recession that cost 7 trillion dollars in the nation’s net worth, primarily from the middle class. All to allow a few already rich speculators to make more money basically gambling, while knowing that the government will cover their losses. And the Republicans are promising to remove the relatively tame regulations put in force to help prevent future crises and in fact are promising even more deregulation and even more and larger problems in the future.

slamfu

I was going to quote a line from merkin’s post to say amen to, but as I read I realized the quote was going to include his entire post. So amen to pretty much the whole thing. The GOP is simply there to fabricate whatever narrative they need to say Obama sucks, even if what he is putting on the table was their own idea at one point. There is no dealing with those guys. That they have basically, as a group, stated they want to employ policies that not only mirror George Bush’s, but the same policies that led up to the crash of 1929 despite what history has shown us, is just insane in my opinion. We know where it leads. How anyone can be on board with their ideas is beyond me.